Horsham Steps is an amazing collection of large boulders that block the River Bovey on Northeast Dartmoor, where it flows through a relatively narrow part of the Bovey Valley known locally as Lustleigh Cleave, between the village of Manaton and the tiny hamlet of Horsham. This is also one of my favourite Dartmoor locations, being a short 90 minute trek from my home.
For January 2023 I am actually showing two images of the same scene yet taken at different times of the year. Read on to find out why.
Horsham Steps is a natural formation of granite boulders blocking the river, used as a footpath to cross from one bank to the other. What bought the boulders here is hard to say – I have tried searching my extensive collection of Dartmoor books for an explanation but to no avail. I suspect they arose as part of an ancient rockfall nearby from the steep-sided flanks of the valley, and became rounded by the action of other smaller boulders and pebbles and general water erosion travelling down the river in times of spate, although perhaps they could also have some sort of glacial outwash origin.
Cleave means “cliff” or “cleft” in old English. The Cleave is a constricted part of the valley of the River Bovey, which owes it’s presence to the underlying geological fault, known to all British geology undergraduates as the Sticklepath Fault Zone, a Northnorthwest-Southsoutheast trending strike-slip fault trend running along an axis across Devon from Lundy Island to Bideford Bay, thence to Torbay via Hatherleigh, the village of Sticklepath near Okehampton, Lustleigh Cleave, and Newton Abbot.
Across Northeast Dartmoor, the Sticklepath Fault Zone consists of two parallel faults in a compound fault zone, that give rise to the Wray Valley and the adjacent Bovey Valley. More importantly for the local economy, localised extensional (pull-apart) sagging at various points along the fault zone gave rise in the early Tertiary to deposition of the Ball Clays that are extensively mined at Bovey Tracey to the Southeast of Dartmoor, and in the past at Petrockstowe Northwest of Dartmoor.
The Sticklepath Fault is rather like the famed San Andreas Fault in California, with primarily lateral rather than vertical movement. And yes, the fault is still seismically active! The seismicity is generally very minor, little more than a brief hardly noticeable tremor every few years, however I do have a reasonably robust theory that ‘The Great Storm’ in 1638 as experienced at the church of St.Pancras at Widecombe, some 10 miles away from Horsham steps, when the Devil himself destroyed part of the church roof and six people were killed by a ball of lightning was more likely caused by an earthquake, but that is another story…
But back to the photograph. There are no steps here as in stepping stones, but the footpath from Horsham to Lustleigh crosses the river by means of these large moss-covered boulders, some of which are the size of a (European) family car. And unbelievably the River Bovey runs through this jumble of boulders, not just as a mere trickle but with sufficient depth to allow Salmon, Sea Trout and Brown trout to migrate upriver to spawn. I myself caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of a ‘large fish’ leaping the lower part of the waterfall back in Autumn of 2020, and I have personally seen a 2 ft Sea Trout upriver by the stepping stones in North Bovey. (I was told a few years ago how to obtain a good haul of Sea Trout further upriver by using a car battery, car headlight and a net rather than a rod and fly, and all without a fishing licence or rod permit, so clearly more than a few make it upriver.)
Horsham steps is surprisingly awkward to photograph easily. Unless you get the time of day right when there is bright sunshine, it is surprisingly dark even in summer with all the foliage. Ideally one wants to take the image from the west bank, with a lens of around 35mm. (My photos of the Steps have generally been taken with a focal length of between 30mm to 45mm.) A tripod is recommended. And there is the choice of ‘freezing’ the water with a fast shutter speed – which requires a higher ISO – or obtaining the ‘misty’effect with a slower shutter speed (making a definite requirement for a tripod).
If the air is perfectly still, you may of course attempt an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image to overcome the issue of low light conditions and avoid using a high ISO and/or wide aperture and shallow depth of focus. I have tried this approach with a modicum of success, but inevitably whilst you are taking your several images there will be a gust of wind or a hiker will appear in a bright orange jacket and sit down for a rest in the middle of the image.
Once you have decided what effect you want, there is then the choice of time of year. If you don’t live locally, maybe you will only be able to visit in the sunnier months of the year when the river is lower and burbling gently along, revealing all the boulders, and surrounded by dark green foliage and shadow. If you are lucky enough to live locally, you can visit in autumn or winter when the river may be in spate, with a dramatic flow of turbulent white water – but do not attempt to cross the river then! You may even get to visit when it is frosty or snowy – I have yet to do so myself so watch out for a future ‘Image of the Month’.
So which is the more dramatic image? I confess that I was slightly disappointed when I visited recently when the river was in spate. The noise was dramatic, but because the boulders were almost completely covered in white water, there was no sense of their enormous size – the river could just have been a turbulent but shallow 6” deep.
For my money the more dramatic images are those taken in the summer months, when the enormity of the boulders is clearly seen, enveloped in the spooky dark shadowy foliage of the temperate rain forest, making one feel that one is an explorer in an ancient ‘lost world’.
What do you think? Summer or Winter?